Word: ludi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wrote for itself. "Get rich," wrote Mark Twain sardonically, "dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must." From this culture of greed arose the primal names of American business: Rockefeller (oil), Carnegie and Frick (steel), Vanderbilt (railroads), the Goulds, Astors, Fisks and, towering over them all, the magister ludi of saber-toothed capitalism, J. Pierpont Morgan. After 1870, America lost all its Puritan inhibitions about the gratuitous display of surplus wealth...
...works out regularly, but his campaign schedule has curtailed his twice- weekly tennis matches. He still quotes from memory lines from his favorite author, the German writer Hermann Hesse, whose visionary novels (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi) describe the quest for enlightenment and serenity. That should be good inspiration for the next President of South Korea...
...late '60s and early '70s, the spine-cracked paperback editions of Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi) stood in a haphazard pile beside every mattress on the floor, next to the roach clips and Earth Shoes. The American counterculture claimed the Swabian mystic as a guru of its own discovery, its subterranean priest. That was perhaps an instructive case of self-absorbed audience imitating self-obsessed author. In fact, Hesse during his astonishingly long career had been appropriated by three other generations (in Germany, anyway) as their own secret voice. Hesse possessed a strange, lifelong affinity for adolescents...
...said Siddhartha to his friend, 'Govinda, come with me to the banyan tree. We will practice meditation.' " Hesse hung his earlier stories with necromantic swags. In the middle period of Steppenwolf, he contrived a surreal kind of existentialism. In his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game (or Magister Ludi, the English title), composed during precisely the years when Hitler consolidated his power, Hesse invented his own classical serenity, all civilization encoded in an infinite chess game to be played like the Pythagorean music of the spheres, but in a motionless universe. The book was completed in Hesse...
...country, but in the past decade in the U.S. he has steadily risen to the status of a literary cult figure. College students rank him in the pantheon of literary gurus with Dostoevsky, Tolkien and Golding. In hippie hovels, those of his novels already available in English-Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi, Siddhartha, Demian, The Journey to the East, and Narcissus and Goldmund-are family bibles. Another early Hesse novel, Beneath the Wheel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $4.95), has now appeared in English. It will undoubtedly attract his youthful admirers too, although it is less likely to arouse their admiration, since...